The controversy swirling around the faux plumber Joe Wurzelbacher raises serious questions about the competence of John McCain’s staff. In Wednesday night’s debate with Barack Obama, the beleaguered McCain repeatedly referred to the semi-apocryphal figure “Joe the Plumber”, a putatively salt-of-the-earth type whose economic future would be imperiled by Obama’s tax policies. An Ohio man who had confronted Obama on the tax issue a few days earlier, Joe the Faux Plumber tried to pass himself off as an entrepreneur who was terrified that Obama’s draconian tax hikes might render this quest impossible. He was, in short, the face of the Common Man.
Like Davy Crockett, who killed himself a bear when he was only three, but tried to sneak out of the Alamo gussied up as a woman, like George Armstrong Custer, the fearless Injun Fighter the Sioux referred to as “Killer of Women”, like Bill O’Reilly, the tough-as-nails talk show host who loves to trumpet his blue-collar roots, even though he grew up in a cute little New York suburb and his father was an accountant, Joe the Plumber has now been exposed as a complete fraud. He is not a licensed plumber. He does not earn enough money to be affected by Obama’s tax policies. He does not have the scratch to be setting himself up in business. He is not a free-thinking independent who has yet to make up his mind which candidate he will cast his vote for; he is a registered Republican. Worst of all, his name is not even Joe; it is Samuel. He is, as my father Joe used to put it, as phony as a three-dollar bill.
There is nothing wrong with being as phony as a three-dollar bill. It is, in fact, a rich American tradition. But there is something unnerving about a supposedly sophisticated political organization that trumpets the dodgy virtues of grass-roots phonies when millions of authentic working-class people could have handled the mythological chores perfectly well. All across America, there are plumbers named Joe and Jim and Jack and Mike and Dan and Dave and Ed and Fred whom the McCain campaign could have recruited to be their mascot.
In my own family, there was Joe the truck driver, Joe the postman, Bill the typewriter salesman, and Johnny the jack-of-all trades. Right here in my own neighborhood, I can point to Tony the deliveryman, Vinny the postman, Charley the cook, Tony the token collector. Any one of these guys qualifies as a real-life working class hero. Instead of them, McCain’s people went out and corralled themselves a 24-carat phony. What’s more, they found themselves a phony who doesn’t even pay his taxes on time. This strongly suggests that nobody in the McCain camp has ever met a working-class person before; they think anybody with a shaved head and a hoodie must be “authentic”.
Which is yet another reason why McCain is not winning this election. The American people do not want their country run by amateurs. Any more than they want their toilets repaired by amateurs.
